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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Immanence, Self-experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Karl Jaspers Edith Stein’s Starting-Point: Natural Experience For Edith Stein, both phenomenology and Thomism begin with ‘natural experience as the starting point of every kind of thinking that goes beyond natural experience’ (FEB, p.333).

She continues: Even though not all knowledge rests exclusively on experience and even though there is, rather, a valid basis of experience which can be known by pure reason, it nonetheless remains the aim of all thinking to arrive at an understanding of the world of experience. Thinking which does not lead to the establishment of the bases of experience but to the abrogation of experience … is without any real foundation and inspires no confidence. (FEB, pp.

333-34) Stein thinks that Husserl and Thomas both begin from experience and respect the givens of experience. For Stein, the tacit assumption of natural experience is that there is a multiplicity of objects (FEB, p. 333). There is an assumption that there is a natural world. But, following Husserl, Stein points out that this concept of ‘nature’ is actually partly constituted by culture; it emerges from an ‘interlacing’ ( Verflechtung ) with mind (FEB, p.

334.The natural world is always already united with intellect, but, Stein goes on, not just finite minds but also refers to infinite mind: The worlds of nature and mind, however, do not exhaust all that which is if by “world of the mind” we mean only a world of finite minds and of structures created by finite minds.

The totality of the created world refers back … to those eternal and non-become archetypes [ Urbilder ] of all created things (essences or pure forms) that we have designated as divine ideas. All real being (which comes to be and passes away) is anchored in the essential being of these divine ideas. (FEB, p. 334-5) Here Husserlian essentialism is wedded to Thomistic reflections on the relation between the finite, created order and its infinite ground.

It is important to emphasise that, in Finite and Eternal Being , Stein is emphatic that her inquiry is philosophical and not dependent on revealed truth, nevertheless, she recognises, at the same time, that her inquiry has to be constrained by revealed truth. For her, theological knowledge gives philosophy the distinction between essence and existence or between person and substance (FEB, pp. 23-24).

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